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9 Message received? Quantifying the impact of informal conservation education on adults visiting UK zoos ANDREW BALMFORD, NIGEL LEADER-WILLIAMS, GEORGINA M. MACE, ANDREA MANICA, OLIVIA WALTER, CHRIS WEST, AND A L E XA N D R A Z I M M E R M A N N

INTRODUCTION

Humanity is growing ever more disconnected from wild places and wild creatures (Gadgil 1993, Nabhan and St. Antoine 1993; Nabhan and Trimble 1994, Pyle 1993, 2003, Balmford 1999, Kahn and Kellert 2002). Over 50% of people now live in towns and cities, and their numbers are rising by 160 000 daily (World Resources Institute 2000). With this in mind the world’s zoos, with more than 600 million visitors each year (WAZA 2005), have enormous potential to educate and inspire the public about conservation. Much is made of this role, in both reviews and policy statements on the conservation significance of zoos (Tribe and Booth 2003, Miller et al. 2004, WAZA 2005). Yet there is evidence that some captive facilities pay only limited attention to conservation education (Dunlap and Kellert 1995, Evans 1997, Mazur and Clark 2000). Against this criticism, very few studies have so far attempted to quantify whether zoo visits change people’s conservation-related knowledge, attitudes, or behavior, or whether such impacts vary across zoos. Most assessment of educational impacts to date has instead been nonquantitative (for reviews, see Kellert and Dunlap 1989, Broad and Weiler 1998, Dierking et al. 2002; see Discussion for counter examples). Moreover,

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rather than examining the effects of a zoo visit on people’s overall conservation knowledge or attitudes, research has usually focused either on general natural history knowledge, or else on whether a visit specifically changes people’s attitudes to zoos or knowledge of zoos’ role in conservation (Dierking et al. 2002). Likewise, much more work has looked at the effects of particular (usually new) exhibits than at the impact of a zoo visit in its entirety (Broad and Weiler 1998, Dierking et al. 2002). Last, few studies have examined the effects of general, informal education on the adult visitor (Kellert and Dunlap 1989, Broad and Weiler 1998, Mazur and Clark 2000). As a result, we are left with remarkably few clear tests of whether and, if so, how zoos change the knowledge, attitudes or behavior of those 600 million visitors. Given the limited evidence to date on zoos’ conservation education impacts, the Zoo Measures Working Group of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA) devised a questionnaire aimed at quantifying the effects of informal education on adult visitors to UK zoos. This focused on measuring various aspects of visitors’ knowledge about conservation, their level of concern about conservation relative to other issues, and their ability to suggest practical ways in which they could make a difference to conservation. We gauged the impact of a single zoo visit on these response variables by comparing the answers of visitors arriving at a zoo with those of a roughly equal-sized but non-overlapping set of visitors leaving the same zoo (see also Broad 1996, Giusti 1999, Spotte and Clark 2004). We thereby avoided problems caused by differences between zoo visitors and the general public, differences between visitors to different zoos (see below), and any confounding effects of our post-visit sample having been aware of the survey questions during their visit. To test the power of our questionnaire, we also collected data on several aspects of visitors’ backgrounds, as well as their general interest in wildlife, to see whether these predicted variation in our response measures. This chapter presents an overview of our findings from questioning 1340 adult visitors at 6 UK zoos (and, for comparison, one nature reserve) during the latter half of 2003. METHODS Our survey

Visitors were surveyed at Bristol (365 people), Chester (64), Colchester (46), London (194), and Paignton (411) zoos, Thrigby Hall Wildlife Gardens (47), giving a total of 1127 zoo visitors. In addition, we also surveyed 213 visitors

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to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Wetland Centre at Barn Elms, London. Questionnaires were handed out by volunteers (at Bristol, Chester, London, Paignton, and Barn Elms) or zoo staff (at Colchester and Thrigby Hall only), but completed entirely by respondents. Respondents classified themselves as ‘‘arriving” (mostly in the entrance queue, and 91.8% within 1 h of entry) or as ‘‘departing” (mostly >3 h and 92.3% >2 h after entry). Care was taken to ensure that no respondents completed more than one questionnaire; respondents under 18 were excluded from analysis. On average, participation in the survey took 5–10 min, with volunteers or staff generally collecting 40–100 completed questionnaires each per day, depending on visitor numbers. The questionnaire

The questions asked fell into four main groups (note that we also asked zoo visitors a series of questions about their attitudes to zoos and zoos’ contributions to conservation, but these are not analyzed here). Background information

We asked visitors to tell us their age (